Independent Researcher of Religious & Gender Studies

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It’s 2016! (And what happened to 2015?)

First, to the loyal readers who have stuck with me through a period of silence: thank you! I’ve been absent from this blog much, much longer than I anticipated.

After my last post, a review of Philip Q. Yang’s Ethnic Studies: Issues and Approaches, I was focused on re-writing a chapter from my master’s thesis for publication. I felt it required additional research (which is where June and July went) and then a complete re-write (goodbye, August and September). This is my first such publication and I am pleased with how the chapter turned out. The volume in which it is being published most likely won’t be out until very late in 2016 or 2017. I will be sure to share the details when the volume is available! I feel exceptionally fortunate to have this opportunity, and to have had the chance to work with two very supportive editors for the essay collection.

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In October I changed direction with my writing. My academic writing and research commitments for 2015 were finished, and I decided to try something different. I wrote lengthy drafts of several personal essays and intermittently wrote fiction. I’d been working on the same bit of fiction on and off for over a year, accumulating about 30,000 words. A friend had mentioned the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) to me just after I’d started the fiction piece in 2014, but I wasn’t prepared at that time.

I am proud to say that in November (2015) I participated in the NaNoWriMo, adding just over 50,000 words to my piece, bringing it to an incomplete draft of about 90,000 words. It was a challenge to prioritize writing fiction over everything else – to the detriment of this blog, and the blog where I write short reviews of the fiction I read, unfortunately – but it was an exhilarating and rewarding experience.

Now that 2016 has arrived, it’s a perfect time to revive this blog. I hope to finish the personal essays I began writing in October, write a set or series of posts on what ‘feminism’ and being a feminist means to me, and share my thoughts on some of the excellent books and articles I read for the chapter I re-wrote last summer and fall. My goal is to post a couple of times a month, and to balance writing for this blog with the several other writing projects in the works.